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The essays in Plantation Kingdom examine the rise to global prominence and fall into “commodity hell” of the colonial and U.S. South's primary staples: rice, cotton, sugar, and tobacco (p. 5). Richard Follett's introduction usefully highlights common themes in these histories, emphasizing that both the growth and decline of the plantation complex in the American South was a product of the changing global flows of labor, capital, and commodities. Likewise, Follett notes that the four essays embrace the new scholarly consensus that slavery helped give rise to global capitalism, especially during the nineteenth-century phase of “second slavery,” when American planters exploited new lands, coercively raised the productivity of enslaved people, and expanded slave and commodity markets (p. 7). Likewise, all four essays view—to varying degrees—the Civil War as a central moment in the collapse of American planters' economic prominence. Plantation Kingdom provides a brief, if at times dense, summary of the work of four leading historians—in effect, a snapshot of the state of the field—suitable for scholars and graduate students.
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